A Rough Picture of Various Forms of Syntactic Merge

Merge is the core computational device in Minimalism, below I draw a tree of various forms of merge. 

Figure 1

Note: 
  1. If there is a "?" node, then it indicates there might be other options available.
  2. The nodes in which the labels are in red are options taken in the standard assumption of minimalism.  
  3. IO: independent objects, that are syntactic objects(SOs) none of which is a subpart of another SO in the WS. 
  4. SO: subpart objects, that are SOs none of which is not a subpart of another SO in the WS. 
  5. MIX: that are SOs involving both SOs and IOs. 
  6. The homo label indicates SOs of the same types (SO or IO), while hetero SOs of different types.  
  7. source labels indicate whether the inputs come from the same SO.
  8. There are some proposals about unary merge out there, but  for me, the real unary merge is one which takes a SO and outputs a singleton in the WS.
  9. why do I use type homogeneity and source as the ground for the classification of n-nary merge? According to the difinition of IM, self-merge is not a case of IM[ACC(T) != T]; While EM is usually defined as the operation of combining some (typically two) different SOs. Thus, it seems like the self-merge case is usually left ignored and EM & IM are defined based on different criteria.
  10. This is, however, in no way a comprehensive picture of merge. There are still possibilities to explore. 

Citation:  Han, C. (2025, August 11). A rough picture of various froms of Syntactic Merge. LiLaCom. https://lifelanguagecomputation.blogspot.com/2025/08/a-rough-picture-of-various-froms-of.html

Comments are welcome !!😁

Comments

Post a Comment